Respawn have banned 770K Apex Legends cheaters so far

Respawn have taken to Reddit to express their delight with how Apex Legends' anti-cheat efforts have been going, and the developer has banned 770,000 cheaters and blocked 300,000 cheater account creations since the game's February launch.

According to the post, Respawn reached out to top security experts from all over the EA family, and the early signs suggest the approach is working.

"While we can't share details on what we're doing so as to not give a heads up to the cheat makers, what we can say is that we're attacking this from every angle", they wrote.

Apex Legends has recently received the in-game reporting tool, which Respawn claim has had an incredible impact, detecting "previously undetectable cheats that are now being found automatically via EAC".

The list of 770,000 banned players is joined by more than 4,000 cheat seller accounts, albeit the latter have all been banned in the last 20 days.

Respawn claim that Apex Legends' PC matches impacted by cheaters have been cut in half in the last month, owing to the dev's anti-cheat initiative.

For what it's worth, Apex Legends' player reports seem to coincide with Respawn's story, which is that cheating has decreased significantly. Naturally, this is not the sort of battle you win, but rather one that you keep fighting, so expect to hear more news pretty soon.

Apex Legends has hit 50 million players in its first month on the market, so 770,000 bans mean that cheaters made up for about 1.5 per cent of the population.

Respawn stressed, however, that the game's success doesn't mean fans should expect Fortnite, because that kind of development schedule is not something they can sustain without overworking the team.

Respawn Entertainment
Apex Legends

Respawn promised that Season 2 will bring new legends, guns, map changes and many other changes that fans expected in Apex Legends Battle Pass' maiden voyage. Considering that cheaters drive away more people than the lack of content though, the dev probably made the right choice here.